A blog about engagement and marketing

New Media Valuation

If you work in marketing, and you’re thinking about using some of the new tools in a way to help create small every day like connections with your customers, then you might be interested in the supposed valuation of some of the tools that can help with those connections.

Plus, this fits into the Social Media Bubble Watch(tm), that I might be on. So here is the list of Start Ups, from the Silicon Alley insider, and their valuations. If you click the link, you can see live updates.

Whenever a new tool emerges, one of the first obvious questions is the strategy for making money. Facebook, which sits at the top of the list, is trying to make money through ads. The Social Media ads at Facebook have a compelling story, and it could work.

Moving down the list, LinkedIn wants to go the Flickr route, of giving away most of the features, but offering a whole bunch more for the people who want a bigger account. As more people enter into the LinkedIn world, this will become a a promising proposition. An upgrade in LinkedIn lets people send inmail, which can be a benefit to people who want to expand their business network.

It was interesting to see that Huffington Post came in over Twitter. Huff Post is a blog. It’s not specifically a tool. And while the Huff Post does facilitate interaction between people, the interactions are content dependent. In other words, Huff Post needs to have good blog posts to generate conversation and community. Twitter isn’t dependent on outside content creation for its interactions. And while I suppose one could make the argument that Yelp depends on the people to make the reviews, Yelp is a tool that is useful when traveling.

As I read that last sentence over, I realize that one can make the argument that Huff Post is a tool that people are using to engage in Politics. Indeed, the blogosphere does a good job at including people in the conversation, even if that conversation is generally with people who agree with them ideologically. Still, I think it sits precariously on this list.

We use, or have pitched some of these tools to clients. And my initial thought was that if we had an account going with Facebook, and they decided that they couldn’t make social media ads work, then our account could go away.

If there is a social media bubble, and we’re heavily invested in a Facebook/Twitter campaign that uses Digg, Mahalo and some other things that aren’t even on this list, what happens to the thing after the bubble?

I’d rather not think it. for now, I’ll just bask in the valuations of the tools I like.